This invention relates to the sweetening of edibles such as foods, beverages and oral pharmaceuticals. More particularly, it relates to the use of certain flavanones as sweeteners for flavanones.
There is an ever-growing need for acceptable sugar substitutes. Mankind's craving for sweetness is well known as are the problems linked to the use of sucrose and other "sugar" materials to satisfy these desires. These problems include obesity, dental caries, and in predisposed individuals--diabeties, to name but three examples. A range of nonsugar sweeteners have been discovered and employed with varying degrees of success over the last half century. The present invention teaches the use of certain flavanones as sweeteners. It is believed to break new ground and add a whole new class of materials to the realm of nonsugar sweeteners as flavanones studied as flavorants heretofore have been reported to have bitter tastes or to be tasteless. As a result, some prior studied flavanones such as naringin (the principle bitter substance in grapefruit peels) are employed commercially as bittering agents. One flavanone, hesperetin, is reported by one investigator, Horowitz, Biochemistry of Phenolic Compounds (Academic Press, 1964, Pages 555-556) as being slightly sweet. No flavanone materials are known to have been reported to have useful sweetness. Two additional references which discuss flavanone taste properties are: Horowitz and Gentile, Agr. and Food Chem. Volume 17, No. 4, page 696 (1969) and Kamuja et al Agr. Biol. Chem., Volume 39, page 1757 (1975).